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But why have we to call in Philosophy to make the Soul immune
if it is thus immune from the beginning?
Because representations attack it at what we call the affective
phase and cause a resulting experience, a disturbance, to which
disturbance is joined the image of threatened evil: this amounts
to an affection and Reason seeks to extinguish it, to ban it as
destructive to the well-being of the Soul which by the mere
absence of such a condition is immune, the one possible cause of
affection not being present.
Take it that some such affections have engendered appearances
presented before the Soul or Mind from without but taken [for
practical purposes] to be actual experiences within it- then
Philosophy's task is like that of a man who wishes to throw off
the shapes presented in dreams, and to this end recalls to waking
condition the mind that is breeding them.
But what can be meant by the purification of a Soul that has
never been stained and by the separation of the Soul from a body
to which it is essentially a stranger?
The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone;
it is pure when it keeps no company; when it looks to nothing
without itself; when it entertains no alien thoughts- be the mode
or origin of such notions or affections what they may, a subject
on which we have already touched- when it no longer sees in the
world of image, much less elaborates images into veritable
affections. Is it not a true purification to turn away towards
the exact contrary of earthly things?
Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a soul no longer
entering into the body to lie at its mercy; it is to stand as a
light, set in the midst of trouble but unperturbed through all.
In the particular case of the affective phase of the Soul,
purification is its awakening from the baseless visions which
beset it, the refusal to see them; its separation consists in
limiting its descent towards the lower and accepting no picture
thence, and of course in the banning for its part too of all
which the higher Soul ignores when it has arisen from the trouble
storm and is no longer bound to the flesh by the chains of
sensuality and of multiplicity but has subdued to itself the body
and its entire surrounding so that it holds sovereignty,
tranquilly, over all.
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